One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
joel.net
joel.net
* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".
Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.
* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.
Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.
So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.
edit: the UK is the only culture I'm really familiar with
I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.
> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_It...
I didn't see lots of Italians creating a PR just to get a T-Shirt
India dwarfs the entirety of Europe, never mind Italy, by population size.
If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.
Hearing the stories from my parents, just getting furniture for a new apartment was already hard, since sometimes it just was not available.
This mentality now still lives on in a lot of us.
There's definitely a blurry line there. I'm not completely clear what "growth hacking" means, but I definitely think SEO crosses a line (basically hacking google's algorithm to mislead them and their customers). Even worse would be things like paying for fake traffic to drive up ad revenue. People generally understand there is a line between legitimate business and scamming people, even when greed/desperation drives them to bend the rules somewhat and rationalize it.
While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,
Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.
Imagine I'm taking Calculus 2 and I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold" or I can get the final exam a few months ahead of time and simply memorize the symbols I need to write into the exam booklet. The latter is self-evidently gaming the system.
When primary school teachers teach directly towards the assessment exam, they are only incidentally teaching the subject and are primarily (IMO) gaming the system as well.
> I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold"
What does cold means? Learning calculus without solving exercises? Or without solving variety of exercises? Intentionally ignoring last years tests and not trying them?
If your learning materials match what the test is supposed to test, you will solve a lot of exercises while learning from them. And the test itself would contain combinations and variations from these.
A test is a proxy for actual performance working on some useful task. The nature of useful work is usually that it can't be represented by two hours of multiple choice questions, whiteboarding, or anecdotes about "a time you disagreed with someone"; therefore, most tests will differ from the work. Learning to pass the test is easier than learning to do the work, but if you do that the test ceases to measure your work performance.
I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride
"For many Indians, self-flagellation is a sign of their intellectual arrival". This was a line I read long ago and it desribes the situation so well.
I don’t see it as an Indian thing (or a Greece thing as someone else replied). It’s a failing of all of global humanity that anything you can get away with is “ok” to 10-49% of the world’s population (have no concrete source, but I “feel” it’s below 50%, but still a significant number). The US President got up on stage just this week and essentially answered the question “why did you pay so little taxes in 2016-2017?” with the response “because I could! Don’t like the tax laws? BLAME JOE!”, taking zero responsibility for his own actions.
Absolutely not true. It applies to low/high trust societies and is an cultural issue.
Tangentially, I personally wish people would stop using the "culture" excuse for a group's bad behavior. Culture doesn't develop in a vacuum. Certain cultural practices could potentially come from really problematic sources. Changing one's culture isn't an insult to anyone if you're changing it for the better. And in this case, even if Indian culture is to prostrate before those you see as your superior, I don't think that's an element of the culture that needs preserving.
They usually don't even recognize that that's what they're implying. They merely want to set themselves up as worthwhile and ask not to be pre-judged. But collectively, you get "crab mentality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality).
On another note, I find Western, affluent self-flagellation much more pervasive and deceptive.
This is untrue. You won't find even a remotely similar tolerance for rule-breaking in Japan.
People are all the same in many ways but cultural differences are still vast.
> have some goddamn pride
We have seen how much damage pride has brought. If you still want to see
1) people without science knowledge claiming religious rituals have scientific reasons
2) people who don't know what linguistics is claiming Sanskrit is the first language
3) people without any knowledge of medicine heralding superiority of Ayurveda
Continue with your godamn pride.
To the foreigners (especially Americans) - I cannot make this up. When I was in 6th standard, we had a teacher that said without flinching, or perhaps completely deluded that - 90% of NASA employees are Indians. We knew this is bullshit even when in the 90's when there was no internet.
Currently, we've got the Indian media tied up with taking pride in the fact that Kamala Harris is Indian.
It's frankly embarrassing how much undeserved pride we constantly seek.
Oh come on. If we are able to mentally swap out cultures in the OP to see how ridiculous your claim is, then you are too. And we have to think you did.
The Ferengi from Star Trek come to mind when I read this.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi
The Rules of Acquisition are always a fun read:
* https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
In this case Rule 3 would probably apply:
> Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
Not to say that people won't overlay their own prejudices over what's actually there, but i see just an explicit contrast of ideas about economies.
The Klingons were originally intended to look Asiatic and resemble Mongols or Japanese samurai, with the Klingon Empire being essentially the Soviet Union In Space. And there is an uncomfortable elephant in the room that Klingons, a species mostly known for violence and bloodlust, are all (or almost all) black coded. While the implications are obviously unintentional, it's impossible not to draw parallels in the history in sci-fi and fantasy to the "swarthy, dark-skinned savage" archetype.
Speaking of which here[0] is a video on Klingons and the history of racial coding in Star Trek if anyone is interested.
The relationship between Cardassians and Bajorans is clearly a metaphor for post-war Germany, with the former being Nazis and the latter Jews. Romulans, obviously, are Space Romans.
The Borg clearly represent the dehumanizing effect of technology and collectivism, making them a perfect foil for the Federation with its techno-utopian ideals. I've heard but can't prove that the Borg were meant to be a parody of Japanese business culture. There are alien stand ins for racial prejudice from "Let That Be your Last Battlefield" and nonbinary gender persecution from "The Outcast," and the Trill species in general. In cases like these, the aliens are meant to serve as a mirror to some aspect of humanity.
And of course the Ferengi have already been discusssed here.
Although in one egregious case (TNG's "Code of Honor")[1] the "aliens" were literally just African caricatures in space. And of course TOS gives us planets with literal space Nazis, space Romans, space Cowboys, space Greek Gods, space whatever costumes they could scrounge from the Desilu lot that week.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqbSQWKV_T8
[1]https://trekmovie.com/2020/06/14/jonathan-frakes-and-denise-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-...
Or you could view them as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.
Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm allowed to do it".
I'm Irish, and there's a lot of this in our society. It was much more accepted in my parents generation, and appears to be reducing a little bit as we become a richer society.
Now, all of them were born a generation after independence, so it's definitely not just that.
However, when the government has historically not given a crap about you (as the British government did not), it leads to a disconnect from the society and institutions that increases the probability that you'll be OK with tax dodging and not have as much trust in the overall society (because historically, it didn't care about you).
So, I'd say that it's slowly changing because we're not a colony anymore, but it definitely didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke in 1921.
We're the only horrifically-bent country in northern Europe
To be fair, though I'm not a fan of the authoritarianism, without the Catholic Church neither of my grand-parents or their parents would have had an education, and indeed the church was the centre of irish social life and community for a very long time.
Like, post-independence, the Church did a lot of dodgy things, but I really don't think you can blame the one organisation which actually provided some services for Irish catholics for our issues with authority.
And it's worth pointing out that much of the remaining corruption in Irish life is at the political level, rather than the bureaucratic level. As an example, you might bribe politicians to get planning permission for a large shopping centre, but you don't have to bribe the passport office for a renewal.
Can you give me some examples of Ireland being horrifically bent?
Edit: incidentally, thank you for Kildare Street!
She said that if anyone ever questioned her she just acted confused and found a way to sneak off. I was flabbergasted. She simply (and proudly) explained: "It's the Brazilian way of life!"
The hundred dollars you get is nothing when you destroy the environment.
Yes, this behaviour is rampant throughout Western society, it's pretty much embraced by capitalism. It's still "who cares about $x, as long as I can get my $y". It doesn't really change the argument much if $x is open source and $y is a free t-shirt, or $x is the habitat of these creatures and $y is gallons of oil.
Don't really see how postmodernism fits in with this though.
I found it interesting at least :)
Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.
Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.
If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism.
(Whether capitalism ever works out in-practice is another argument entirely. My theory is that given any long-enough amount of time, a small group of actors will amass hugely disproportional wealth, and then start gaming/breaking the system for everyone else, as seems to be human nature.)
It gets really tiring (especially in modern tech culture) to say "I'm a capitalist" and then have people dogpile on you, asking why you want to pillage the environment and steal all the wealth, etc etc.
And then you have to explain, "I want none of that. I just don't want anyone telling you how to live your life, and to have as many opportunities as you can create for yourself."
I say all of this as someone who grew up exceedingly poor, in trailer parks eating peanut butter and crackers, with no higher education.
There are shitty people everywhere. Because some humans are murderers, does not mean all humans are murderers. Become some people are twisted, unethical capitalists, does not mean all capitalists are twisted and unethical.
At some stage of hyper-capitalism, when you hit "oligarch" levels, you've stopped representing capitalistic ideals because you have created a less-free market than when you entered.
If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.
I view capitalism the same way I view communism -- both are bleeding-heart idealism that never works out in practice.
But hey, at least on an individual/personal level you can pick that hill to die on, however futile it may be.
Anyway, there is an old quotation attributed to Horace (about 65 BC):
Be but great, With praise or infamy—leave that to Fate; Get Place and Wealth, if possible with grace; If not, by any means get Wealth and Place;
That's an English translation from Alexander Pope, somewhere in the 1700s. Maybe he made it up.
Either way, you can't blame America.
Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:
- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.
- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.
- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.
- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.
I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".
Or at least I like to hope.
Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.
I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.
But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."
If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.
And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.
I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.
This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.
Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.
Anything else is being nothing but a hypocrite.
And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.
So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.
My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.
And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.
Just wanted to mention that this is such a US cultural idea. It's really not nearly as strong elsewhere (maybe some exceptions, I don't know everywhere in the world).
That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:
1.
I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.
This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.
Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.
2.
Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.
Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.
These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.
"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.
Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.
It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.
If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.
So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.
Because, in their own words, that is what they're saying when discussing capitalism.
From a thread yesterday: "I owe nothing to a stranger".
No, it's not.
Capitalism is one of many models of how the state can regulate commerce through the definition of the parameters and boundaries of property rights.
You can tell it's not cultural by the way Greeks abroad are not known for "gaming the system".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis
Aye, it's common knowledge in Greece that he came across his huge fortune by being a nice guy and never stepping over any lines, of law or ethics. True fact.
/s
Generally he was thought to be trustworthy if you cut a deal -- no matter how corrupt and shady the deal was -- but absolutely willing to bribe, coerce, threaten, and completely willing ignore regulations and rules.
Or, look at the way the Brexit campaign convinced half of the UK citizens to vote for Brexit with unsubstantiated claims like "350 million to the NHS" or "Millions of migrants from Turkey coming over" etc.
In general, I think both OP and you are making the same mistake: assuming that because we're citizens of once or currently very poor countries, we're doing something different than the more affluent countries, or are somehow backwards, more corrupt, etc.
Far as I can tell, rich countries are rich because they're better at this game of taking as much as they can from everyone they can anyway they can, than we are.
Just think of who is associated with "move fast and break stuff". Is it an Indian startup? A Greek startup?
McDonald's in the US, ketchup is free.
who's nickel and diming? US prices are lower across the board.
The point being, you have to rise above your circumstances. Just because everyone you grew up with is doing something gravely immoral doesn't make it correct. No culture should exude pathological behavior as a trait.
"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.
Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Everyone breaking a rule will say that they're doing this. They'll claim they're just bending the rules. Even when they're engaged in massive law breaking behaviour they'll claim that those laws don't really matter and that the ends justify the means.
Hacktoberfest highlights the problem with this paragraph of Graham's. Hundreds of thousand of people being "naughty", hacking the system, cause problems for other people.
If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating it.
(For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.)
Yes, things get fouled up from time to time but this is really the same as the old hacker ethos. It is the mindset that led to Woz building a computer from scratch, the internet being an open system and the concept of open source thriving.
Also, it's considered acceptable and clever to order clothes, use them at an event, and return as "defective." Quaint concepts like morality are not even considered relevant.
The low pricing in one country doesn't translate to low pricing in another country, especially with digital goods.
Things are changing though now. Many streaming services are doing well in India as prices are appropriate and people are educated on the value of the goods.
It is also related to strong laws/enforcing of laws as well, which is also improving in my opinion.
All of which are not necessarily unique to India.
Now, you or I might say that they aren't really available for free (they're stolen/pirated), but any thoughts of that kind just don't appear in many people (amoral, not immoral).
That type of spam, especially on GitHub (so by folks trying to get into IT) really only reinforces the stereotype that 95% of Indian IT students can't code [3] [4].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24645000
[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/what-is-b...
[3] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...
Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook.
If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold.
(In the large scheme of things, its really positive that so many people worked out how to make a PR, and were then motivated to do so- lets not shame them too hard. Although occasionally neccessary, we must be mindful about gatekeeping, especially with the young and inexperienced)
Now, updating “copyright 2018-2019” to “2020” isn’t.
Unfortunately, in many cases now, copyright is based on the year the author died, rather than the year the work was created, which means it is much harder to work out if something has entered the public domain.
Changing the date without changing the code significantly is arguably fraudulent.
In some countries the publishing date is what counts, and they define publishing for websites as when the site was viewed.
No, the publishing date is relevant (not the first publishing date).
if you create some content in 2018 and I rip it off in 2019 and then you update your copyright to 2020, what's to stop me from saying I came up with it first?
I regularly have to shop around for libraries. Seeing a copyright 2017 doesn't bode well for the documentation or the project being maintained.
That is the thing with spam in general - you can tell it from legitimate mail easily, but is it still annoying and requires you to deal with it.
Of course, if a company started offering free t-shirts for mailing list submissions and some foolish (but well-meaning) youtuber would publish a tutorial on how to subscribe and post to a mailing list, I have no doubts that there would be a deluge regardless of this higher bar. :)
> feedback that can be given right there on the line of code it pertains to
Done easily with a mailing list, and you can be sure that the comment won't just magically disappear because GitHub decided it was fixed even when it wasn't.
> excruciatingly painful if they don't even use a modern DVCS like git.
As far as local development is concerned, there's no reason you can't use all the git tools to manage your changes.
Comments about a patch are fleeting and should be gone after the patch lands — and should be treated as such. Any relevant comments will be in the source code.
GitLab (and several others) can be self-hosted for free; and the walled garden (GitHub?) is tolerable enough. And as long as you keep your software development practices sensible (centred around git, not GitHub), there hardly is a wall really.
> As far as local development is concerned, there's no reason you can't use all the git tools to manage your changes.
Certainly possible, but I didn't manage to get git-svn working the last time I wanted to contribute to a SVN repo. In the end I just created a local git repo in-place and generated the patch with git format-patch.
As someone who has been contributing to Linux for a few years now, which uses mailing lists exclusively for all development (and not only do they use Git, they wrote it) I've found that mail-based workflows are in some ways better to GitHub/GitLab/etc:
1. You can review individual patches, you cannot do this in GitHub at all (commenting at the bottom of a commit doesn't count because it's not tied to the PR and the comment is lost to ether on force-push). GitHub also defaults to you reviewing the full diff and make reviewing individual commits kind of frustrating (you're just dropped into the commit history view rather than a proper review view).
2. All code reviews end up being line-based because the patch is the main body of the email. Design discussion happens as replies to the cover letter of the patch set, meaning you can easily tell which kind of discussion is happening. You can also directly comment on the git commit message, which the kernel community values a lot more than most projects.
3. You can far more easily be notified on patches sent to sections of the tree (though this is slightly tied to Linux's development workflow with subsystem maintainers). GitHub only lets you watch a repository and get the firehouse of events -- which is about as useful as subscribing to the main LKML and trying to keep up with the notifications.
As for difficulty, honestly the bar to entry to send a patch to a mailing list if you're using Git is just:
$ git send-email --to ... --cc ... origin/master
There's a lot that the guy could have done differently to demonstrate what a legitimate pull request looks like. Because this wasn't it.
The problem a lot of the hacktober fest PR don't do any of that.
E.g. on the rust repo some one added a bunch of PRs which add "### The best" to some readmes.
There are software projects out there, even highly used ones, that only use Github to mirror their SVN repository (or some other yesteryear source code system). For those maintainers these PRs do take up more time than they contribute though.
I can limit interactions to non-new users.
I can limit interactions to users that have contributed before.
I can limit interactions to users that I have manually whitelisted in my repo.
Unfortunately, only one of these can be active at a time, but the options do exist now.
Go to your repo -> Settings -> Moderation Settings -> Interaction Limits
Check out this PR: https://github.com/OscarZhou/CSharpTraining/pull/1/commits/8...
How would you like to receive dozens of PRs like that? You would absolutely consider that blatant spam.
I'm sure my first ever PR was adding an example to the docs for something, and if that had been closed with no response and labelled spam I doubt I'd have stayed around to contribute again.
I am internally debating if I should participate in this hacktoberfests given the spams going on
A lot of projects have simply no easy guide to get from a git pull to a working build for someone not familiar with the language or build system used.
At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the pull request (PR) was inconsistent with my preference. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding why this change was warranted. Then I looked at the PR author's profile and found that the same person had submitted several such trivial PRs to other projects too, all of them changing "this" to "the" at some places in README files.
It all began to make sense when I looked at the calendar. It was Oct 01. This looked like PR spam due to Hacktoberfest. For now, I just labelled the PRs as "invalid" (as suggested by https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/), closed the PRs, and moved on.
Like all good things created with good intentions on the Internet, spam is hurting this event and bringing bad reputation to it. The possibility of large scale, endless spam should be worked into the design of any new Internet-based event or solution.
I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.
Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull
Requests on GitHub. :)
The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :(
Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :)
Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)
There's no reason to ever look at or respond to PR from someone who doesn't at least have their own repo (or at least a fork of a repo) with non trivial commits (at least to a toy/learning project)
They're doing this so that they can put "I have x amount of accepted pullrequests on github" and fool an employer to hire them. To become shit team members or outsourced to become shit offshore team members*.
I have seen these kinds in many a project. Real world experience. Real talk.
Yes, I have seen a bunch of those on popular repositories over the years. It is an annoyance, but usually so little, even on popular repos (I contributed much to PHP as example of project size) that it's easy to ignore (or even simply merge if it's somewhat useful, the fooling won't lead them far)
The difference with this marketing stunt is that there is way more active encouragement for that and way more of it at once ... multiple a day instead of one every few months
There is a good amount of questions on SO or tutorial blog posts that are basic, really basic stuff. Things that if you had barely any idea of what you were doing you would figure out but you don't.
Oh and now guess what, this flood of PRs raises the bar and annoyances for everybody.
As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says
> A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues.
and
> A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues.
???
Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day?
Amazing Project is more relevant, but if you take a look at those issues (sorted by newest), you see that most of the PRs that show aren't spam at all: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project&s=created...
If you want to count how many spam PRs were directly inspired by the video, you can try searching "an amazing project" (with quotes), and filtering by newest. It looks like there have only been about 50 PRs directly inspired by it.
https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=%22an+amazing+project%22&...
I realize GitHub is one of the most popular choices out there but the activity stream is already social mediaesque enough for my taste. There's other ways to tackle this, DO could make their marketing stunt opt-in and GH could respond to the people wanting to add friction to their repo's workflows in a way that provides value, without crippling the general user experience.
My mind did not parse anything after ":"
Think I shall go ruin a VM tonight... :)
From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds:
https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3...
I opened a few at random to spot-check, and they all seemed like garbage to me. Like this one, ugh https://github.com/mongodb/docs/pull/4402/files
If you restrict it to "in:title", you see that there's only 44: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+creat...
And if you sort by "newest" or "oldest", which provide a more representative sample, you can see that most of them are not spam: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=amazing+project+created%3...
Certainly, restricting to the title misses plenty of PRs. But his search provides 252 PRs, and I'd estimate that easily <100 of them are spam.
Here's a search that finds a lot: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+improve+created%3A%3E...
Sort by newest and you'll see that the vast majority of these PR's are legitimate: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=in%3Atitle+improve+create...
For example: https://imgur.com/a/vxCHvcO
This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week".
I guess this was bound to happen since hacktoberfest and similar programs have become so popular. Part of me is sad that some influencer is so careless and rallied 20 something enthusiastic kids to do this and adding another bad incident Indians will be remembered for.
Edit: I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile. When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. It's just so much of a convoluted mess, that even the capable students distance themselves from it (convoluted, as in these capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now. And the one club head is a former part of these guys who really hasn't improved in the 2 years after that). Much of this bad guidance contributes to that statistics you see on how "90% of Indian coders are unqualified"
Edit 2: (just dropping my reply down the thread from) Someone mentioned that I shouldn't drag other Indians into this. I guess that was bad judgement on my part as it doesn't really matter here, I apologise it I came off as disrespectful to fellow South Asian demographic, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to bring attention to an underlying issue. We have a lot of bad rep for filling sites like Quora and Medium with loads of low effort content, sending unsolicited messages on LinkedIn and AngelList, and in general bad etiquette in messaging others over the internet. Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populace), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people on how to conduct written communication and how to behave in casual to semi-formal settings in the internet.
Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.
I wonder if that's a factor the behavior you observed - if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.
So with that said - I'm interested in other people's takes and happy to accept constructive criticism :)
I am a student so my world-view is highly myopic. That said, in my personal experience, there is a pressure among engineers to stand out, else they won't get a good job. Also there's a rat race mentality inculcated by our parents to excel and always one-up others, rather than to co-operate and collaborate. It was okay when we were school-students and had to contest for entrance into a renowned college. But, the "I was the topper in high school, I gotta excel in adult life, be it through hook or by crook" mentality still runs in college and (hearing from seniors and relatives) in jobs. People are eager to do the 4 hour course on Tensorflow and mention "Tensorflow expert" in their resume to get an edge, people will and do write "Hacktoberfest 2018 and 2019" in their resume, a guy who can fire up an EC2 instance will call himself "moderately proficient in AWS". I'm not joking about these, job-hunting season is starting and I've seen resume of other students mention all this. People see videos of conferences where engineers wear swag t-shirts, and associate swag with good developers, that was further intensified by this guy's video and people wanted this swag for all these reasons.
I guess I've gone slightly OT here, so I'll summarise: Herd mentality due to poor guidance, peer pressure among engineers and the societal pressure to stand out (for securing jobs) is a big culprit here
Be very careful with this. At a company I used to work for, the hiring managers started to have a negative view of Indians as they became known for their inflated resumes.
This makes it really hard to hire people from TCS. I did eventually find two good ones, fortunately.
I have been told something to this effect. That some families, for example, are "business oriented" and raise their children to view everything as negotiable and for the taking. While other families may be focused on engineering or something else. It fits with strong parental involvement there, and the expectation that the children must support the prior generation. Easiest to push children in a direction you know. Basically multi-generational career goals.
Culturally, India is not really homogenous so I can't say anything for the 1.34 billion people but at least in the region I live in, cheating is normalized since first grade. Be it contests, exams or any other status games. Shortcuts are encouraged. There is little incentive for anyone to play fair. Schools want to look good on paper and competitive so they help students cheat, pay for false advertisements and enrollment. Parents do the same and well, kids will learn it if you incentivise that.
For the job seeking, it's pretty much desperation and high unemployment rate.
Through sheer scale, spammers of Indian origin may be more noticeable than others and thus reinforcing the stereotype.
The issue was solved by Google (and others) stepping up their spam detection game. The spam problem can and should be stopped with the technology, but I am not sure if Facebook has the motivations to do this.
Disclaimer: I am an Indian
Hey, I'd like to help if possible. I'd probably not have the time to mentor, but I can help with learning resources. All my books are free to read online (https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks) and I have lots of bookmarks collected over the years. For example, Python(https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/) and CS(https://github.com/learnbyexample/curated_resources/blob/mas...)
If you are interested, connect with me on twitter (https://twitter.com/learn_byexample) or mail me on gmail (use HN username)
PS: I'm Indian too, but I don't think that'll necessarily help here.
I looked into Python and regex
There is a general problem (everywhere, but particularly in India where there are a lot of people but very little guidance) of eager people who are willing to participate in programs that get them interested in software development and open source and coding. And I think that’s really great. The issue is that providing people with free swag and walking away is really just pretending to help, rather than actually doing work to help.
It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix a bug, write a test for the fix, and then submit the pull request. That would have put a lot of people on the right path.
But it's much easier and quicker to just do a quick, meaningless change, and as a result give a really bad example.
Isn't that basically the definition of spam: "but making something useful would take significantly more time and effort"?
I don't know Hindi, but since it's a "free swag" video I assume some people with limited or none technical knowledge also saw it. There's a big chance people are just following it without knowing the consequences of their actions.
I am also an Indian student and can confirm this is very true.
There are so many people posting 20 line tensorflow 'projects', often copied code, for the "swag" of it.
Even competitive coding is gamed a lot. You can't judge people on competitive coding profiles.
> Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populance), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour.
This is mostly better attributed to the rat race mentality that is so common among Indians. Everything wrong with education in India stems from this. The rote learning based education, high competition for entering CS degrees despite lack of interest, low quality work in indian outsourcing firms, and company politics to become manager ASAP.
I say, cancel him. And all his fans. CC's think they're hot shit because they can produce a video and upload it to youtube, forgetting entirely that it is the content of the video that gives it any worth. We hate on moronic Medium posts idiotic PR releases, and other low-effort media, why should this be any different? If he deputizes his audience to be assholes he should pay for it.
Stop letting ignorance be an excuse with these folks.
Is this true? I don’t speak Hindi but this is exactly opposite to what the pull quotes on the original article say that he said.
-"Don't send PR to popular repos, they'll mark it as spam"
-"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out of 20 is doable"
-"Hacktoberfest has had seasons when they didn't get enough participants and had leftover merch. I request every single one of you to go grab one"
The thumbnail can be translated to "Big Co. distributing free t-shirts, go grab 'em"
Also, his previous pinned comment asked people to tell him about swag-grabbing tactics from other events so he can make another video on it (There was a comment where he was enquiring a guy on how to get Azure merch). His entire video was appalling to go through.
The same translation of:
"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable"
It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.
> I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs
This is the translation of his long winded explanation rationalizing on how "Improved docs" PR which adds "Awesome project" to docs is actually an improvement, and the PR is just asking the owner to incorporate these "improvements" to his codebase. Spam wasn't directly worded (I don't remember there being a hindi word for that), but he explicitly mentioned to write random crap in the docs and post it to repos they find on page 100 of repo search, so I guess that's a plausible enough to be translated as "spam".
The translation I am most interested in is the 1 minute before and after the "4 out of 20".
As someone who was raised bilingual, I always struggle when asked to translate a specific phrase between languages because literal translations are often less useful or accurate than the "interpreted" translation. I would be very suspicious of anyone who claims they have translated something someone else said without changing its meaning at all.
As an example of that, translators sometimes get jobs to translate at parties like weddings, and sometimes a drunk person comes up to the client and try to hit on them. If the person is muttering then the translator translate the muttering. If they are rambling they translate the rambling. They don't interpret and tell the client that the person is hitting on them, and they don't hide the drunk speech by making it sounds more coherent. Their job is to relay what is being said as exact as the two languages allows it. Naturally as languages has different concepts and ways to express things you do not get a lossless translation, but you do get the nearest translation based on the skill of the translator.
And my follow-up comment about being suspicious was about the vast majority of people who do translations (especially online), and I would go so far as to argue that some degree of suspicion should also be applied when newspapers use translations as though they are direct quotations. But I wasn't (generally speaking) talking about professional translators.
I fully agree that translation should make one suspicious, especially those involving politics. When news in my native language has translations from English (second language) that sounds just a bit too much on the nose it usually prompt me to go and read the original source. Almost every time i find that the original statements involve a lot of contextual nuances.
Or just direct newbies to a bunch of volunteer/sample repos dedicated to helping newbies learn the system, and maybe offer a competitive higher tier of prizes for PRs nominated by repo owned and chosen by DO.
I think this gives the spammers too easy an out.
They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions.
Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vandalism with a profit motive.
One guy encourages people to be assholes, and the people respond by acting like assholes. Both leader and followers are wrong in this case.
In my mind the problem lies with the college, they should be teaching their students how to contribute meaningfully. Spamming behaviors will only hurt the reputations of everyone from that college.
Malicious bots would be 2nd.
I've never learned why DO is a malicious traffic leader. Maybe they're competing with OVH to be the next MCColo.
That's my guess. That was the original value prop, right? MCColo with SSDs on every instance.
Looking back at all prior HN stories with "hacktoberfest" in the title or with "hacktoberfest" and "spam" in the comments, I can't find any that talk about it being a big problem before this year.
I found one maintainer who said they got a non-negligible number of garbage pull requests for it, but they still said Hacktoberfest was cool. There was also one post about a filter one project adopted a year ago that used heuristics to identify and automatically reject Hacktoberfest pull requests from new submitters that were too trivial.
I'd have expected more if it was a problem to the extent that it seems to be this year.
A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane.
I feel ashamed to say I am an Indian.
It even seems as though DigitalOcean is blocking these type of repositories. From the FAQ:
My pull request is marked as being on an excluded repository. What does this mean?
Unfortunately, your pull request was made on a repository that doesn’t align with the core values of Hacktoberfest. We’ve decided that pull requests made to this repository will not count toward completing the challenge.
I don't understand this. You don't have to defend the actions of individual(s) even if they share their nationality with you. It's sufficient to call them out for unacceptable behavior. For people who ascribe this to all Indians, it's on them not on you.
I disagree with you.
It's a common thing that online polls/contests/games generate this kind of behaviour. Online polls a trolled, games are hacked and online contests that rely on making others work create a mess.
Too many countries' populations would be more likely to be reflexively defensive instead.
Though I'm in england and grew up considering british indians' self deprecatory sense of humour something to aspire to, so ... I'm not going to tell you not to feel ashamed, but I -am- going to tell you that your comment mostly reminds me why I like the culture that leads you to say that :)
You and your godamn pride.
I think you may have entirely misunderstood my comment.
I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it odd that people who had contributed meaningfully to OSS would suggest a numerical bound on PRs as a measure of meaningful contributions.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with. The "bad actors" are assholes, sure, but I think you also need to revise your concepts about meaningful OSS contributions.
Do NOT auto-include closed PRs.
Let maintainers choose to add a hacktoberfest label to contributions they think are worth rewarding, if they want to opt-in and they like that particular contribution.
Don't emphasise t-shirts, emphasise fun and the rewards of helping OSS.
These are not difficult challenges, they could fix the process right now if they wanted to. Yes their numbers would go down, but they'd be rewarding genuine contributions, as originally intended.
I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused, and wasted time of hundreds of maintainers who now have to clean up their repo. Did "the room" consider this, at all, and what if they did, what was the conclusion?
Edit: I added neom's original comment, still have it on my browser.
As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days.
Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes:
* 7 spam - https://github.com/seductivegeese/softi.es
* 8 spam - https://github.com/easydepot/websiteSwallower/pulls
* 8 spam - https://github.com/tokio-rs/website
* 13 spam - https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website
* 15+ spam - https://github.com/pyvec/elsa
* 15+ spam - https://github.com/justicedemocrats/candidate-website
* 15+ spam - https://github.com/Salamek/blacklist
* 20+ spam - https://github.com/openmaptiles/www.openmaptiles.org
* 25+ spam - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitzjs.com
* 60+ spam - https://github.com/EdmontonPy/edmontonpy
Heck, take look at the PRs and commit history of https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler. It's been two days into October, and this repo has gotten 55 PRs. It hasn't ever gotten a single PR before this as far as I can tell.
As someone completely unaffiliated with Hacktoberfest (only attendee over several years), my impression is that there really haven’t been much issues with it until this year.
I’m quite confident it was all done in good faith.
Unlike all those shit, SPAM PRs.
I don't, you messed up!
The fact that you're actually incentivising contributors to make PRs of any quality and without standards, whilst forcing the burden on to maintainers (without reward) and you do very little (no tutorials about how to make quality PRs, no standards information on what comprises of a good PR, no quality guidance what so ever!).
This seems like a marketing stunt that has backfired and you're saying that you don't deserve some backlash?
Yet I standby my statement, you're not blameless here.
I know the standard answer to this is that it would exclude some repos (ex: node) that merge PRs manually via git. However:
1. You already are excluding every open source project not on GitHub, so this is a really weak point.
2. I am extremely confident trading off not including a very small subset of repos for removing the incentive to spam bad PRs is a worthwhile trade.
For sure, but the Hacktoberfest promotional website treats this as a second order effect, instead of the primary goal it really should be.
The primary motivation for participants is the free t-shirt, because that's the incentive that's being pushed. What is not promoted - and should be promoted - is the impact of contributing: making a change for the better, the social good, taking a step towards connecting with new people, learning opportunities, making a mark in the world with your name on, etc.
The problem OSS faces is not just finding enough contributors. It's finding contributors who are intrinsically motivated to actively engage with a project.
And so, the current campaign inadvertently targets loads of people who don't really care for the code or the projects themselves: they just want the exclusive t-shirt as a trapping and not much more.
I'm sure the campaign still attracts contributors who genuinely want to submit a good PR (I sure am going to do an effort). But frankly, if the campaign ends up devolving into a frenzy for t-shirts, it's hard not to feel demoralized: that's not the spirit of the campaign, and that's quite likely not what DO originally intended, right?
Digital Ocean is not a student under our guidance that we owe a supportive feedback style. They don't even behave like a peer where things can be discussed eye to eye. They interact like a business: as if they're correct and infallible until sufficiently proven wrong that their face is covered in egg.
>posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive
That's entirely constructive advice... for the end consumer. It is smart to remember the results of a business' prior actions when you consider future dealings with them. Even if they're all well-intentioned and lovely people that wielded their one-to-many relationship poorly.
>I take real issue with all the vitriol.
The mirth of a "shitoberfest" twitter account and consumer advice in a blogpost aren't all that vitriolic, what they are is simply not friendly to DO.
Don't let your sunken cost and in-group bias distract you from seeing the unfortunate externalities of decisions here. You're separating intent from effect when that is the exact problem. DO created a program which incentivized spam that puts long-term strain on a community which it derives revenue from long-term, just for short term benefit.
If you or anyone else who designed that program doesn't understand that and take action until a /satirical twitter account/ has to pop up, that's really bad. I don't think you should try and make excuses for it. You should try to understand why the incentive broke and caused unintended side effects first before you go criticizing others.
Here's some constructive criticism: DO should send $20 to the donation box of every repo owner who got a spam PR.
And since you don't even work for DO but seem to like them: stop creating more bad PR for them by making embarassing comments in their name.
This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.
Though I imagine with all the outrage over this that will definitely be changing.
"As a maintainer, how should I handle spam pull requests?
We dislike seeing spam pull requests just as much as you, so please give them an invalid or spam label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word invalid or spam won't be counted toward Hacktoberfest."
It is really quite easy to follow. The 'invalid' label is available by default already, so flagging spam is as simple as selecting that label and closing the PR. See also Hacktober's recent update on reducing spam [2].
[1]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/
[2]: https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update
Luckily that repo isn't terribly important and was only two pieces of "spam". But I can't imagine the shitstorm real open source projects are going to experience. Either they have to weather the storm or, what, disable PRs for a month? Yikes.
Yes. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Stepping on a soapbox, I think a certain kind of economics thinking should be introduced to students at a reasonably young age, no later than secondary education, that thinking being "Incentive Analysis" where students are taught to think through where various people's and groups' incentives are, and why it matters. If nothing else, it should clear up fuzzy cliche-based thinking which can be misleading even though it has a kernel of truth: "If you aren't paying, you're the product" is wrong in some very important ways, starting with the fact that if you are paying, you might still be the product. For example: You pay for a service, in effect giving the company money for selling your information to other companies eager to have a line on a high-value paying customer.
There's nothing wrong with accuracy of "If you aren't paying, you're the product".
DigitalOcean, like the British, had good intentions, but didn't think this through to its logical conclusion.
``` This video is promoting and teaching people how to get a free t-shit by showing them how to do spam pull request. These requests have flooded real world open source projects on Github. This is ruining the community's efforts. ```
After doing all these programming videos, he then started doing laptop recommendations and what not. But I never expected this. I mean there are lot of simple tech videos coming out of India some good some bad but I never expected to see encouragement of such kind of behaviour.
But I have also seen videos by Indian "gurus" who preach how to get free websites on github, without understanding what github really is.
This culture of submitting a PR to get into conference or get some swag has been there for a while. If I recall correctly, during the peak of openstack summits, it was a requirement to submit some BS PR to show that the engineers contributed to openstack repo.
It happened several times that there was a reported bug, which was totally bogus or added by mistake (added to wrong project for instance), however repo owner hasn't closed it, so the tool gave false positive.
Obviously said tool allowed adding exception rules, etc. but I can't imagine how annoying it would be if there were hundreds of such crappy reports and it seems we are going in that direction.
This looks like another consequence of globalization and leaving in the "global village", everyone can jump in into someones village and do harm over there and it is hard to get rid or somehow punish such unwanted visitors.
People would do a lot to gain 15 minutes of fame, even if this is just wearing some t-shirt.
Maybe that is not a big surprise, some people beat their parents or girlfriends or boyfriends and put that on Youtube for fame and money - whole "pato" streamers market is built around this (with said victims participating in the show to earn even more money).
> Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did.
This is the problem on the industry today. All these “how to...” and no depth
Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.
https://twitter.com/shitoberfest/status/1311843369077764097?...
In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain".
If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR.
I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.
I hang out in some rookie forums and it seems like every other day someone posts a snippet and I find that they have used foo/bar somewhere in the code without realizing it was supposed to be a placeholder. CWH made a tutorial on how to get some text from your computer into an open source repository and that is commendable, but his viewers have forgotten to do the bit where they actually produce content worth merging and that is not his fault.
Not looking to discount the severity of the problem in terms of productive time lost, but the use of the word "whole" there wins my overstatement of the year award.
https://github.com/bryanrasmussen/AmazingProject
Now I guess I will have to make some sort of solution that autorejects anything that doesn't have the word amazing (or some synonym for amazing, I'm not a tyrant)
on edit: hmm, there's a typo in the Readme, a good start.
That's pretty impressive given that we're still in the first day of this (or maybe great timing if it had already been in development).
i gotta say all this shittoberfest hype now really killed my mood and i hope that in the end the 70000 t-shirts will still be enough. Also i did not have the time to start hacking on the 1st october directly.
it seems to also be a problem of scale. At first only a select few knew about hacktoberfest. now so many people want to participate, that they try to limit the possible reward. So yeah i hope it is still enough for me and not gone, because too many people gamed the system...
But I have tons of open issues with complaints. As usual, 0 help given.
I guess I am just another unappreciated OSS maintainer
sad_face
[1] https://github.com/orliesaurus?tab=repositories&q=&type=sour...
PS : I really wanted to mark your README.md with "An Amazing Project" but I guess there are enough "Amazing Projects" on github for october :P
Either projects opt-in, or they add some qualification to what is an acceptable PR.
Of course the Youtuber has a role in this, but I feel like they’re just playing the game; the real solution needs to come from the source of the problems, which is DO.
I suppose you can already count me as one of the beneficiaries of this program, simply because it got me to learn new things. I think Hacktoberfest is a good idea, speed bumps like this one notwithstanding.
(Just want to be part of the crowd throwing their entire groups under the bus)
It's absurd that even closed prs count, and absurd they put the burden on maintainers to actively flag spam and auto-include all repos, many repos simply don't want changes of any kind.
Yes this means it won't apply to lots of repos and less people will be involved. That's ok.
"I don't think he's a bad person and don't want to shame him.
> Literally writes an essay on his very public blog shaming the guy and showing his username/channel repeatedly
This is nothing new, though the volume has increased a bit.
DigitalOcean could work with maintainers to allow registration and get some kind of participation icon for maintainers to put on their repo.
Maintainers, Github and Digital Ocean could work together to define parameters of acceptance for PRs (maybe an integration?).
The YouTube could then become the face of the thing for India and show people how to make a meaningful PR on a digital ocean repo. It would also serve as an ad for them.
Just be nice to each other...
* An entry on resume.
If you had to work for three months to afford your phone, would you be more likely to spend fifteen minutes to get a free shirt, or less?
We tried it with an online event in August and it was immediately flooded with fake signups from people in poorer parts of the world.
(Honestly made me sad more than frustrated. But we're not equipped to give out that many shirts.)
At the local sandwich shop folks will stand in line for an hour to get a free crappy sub $5 sandwich...
Otherwise some folks in other theads indicated that in some places, specifically india, participating in hacktoberfest and getting PRs was good for resumes and educational recognition.
It's really sad that a guy who teaches coding asks people to spam FOSS projects to get that so called "swag".
you kind of are there, don't you think?
Just look t those: https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher/pulls
PR: Improve ocs [sic]
-
+ This is an amazing project made to dimplify [sic] things
- However, not all topics are supported.
+ However,not all topics are supported.
- We are glad that you liked our package.
+ We are glad about all those who liked our package.DO should make a list of participating repos and only PRs to those make you eligible.
That should help people getting spammed.
Let's say if the the user doesn't have many PRs in profile, and sending a lot of them within 24 hours.
Sounds like it will be a lot easier for github bot to flag these.
I'm hoping github can quickly step up and ban all accounts that submit spam PRs, to protect the integrity of open source but to also protect people from themselves.
Uh, that's a stretch.
Edit: Wait...I can get T-shirts for PR'S? Somehow I missed that memo. Is this retroactive? /s
Idiot has historically meant "retarded" so if you wanted to say "ignorantly" you could have just said that, or "idiotically" is fine but don't pretend it has such wholesome roots.
It's the organizers of the Hacktoberfest who make people look for his tutorial.
What's next, blaming people who create "Learning To Program" videos on all the bad code that exists in the world?
Except when it's a video clearly titled "win free shit" by abusing a system and the means to do it involve a pull request.
If I make a video on how-to insurance fraud by setting a car on fire, would you defend me by saying it's just a video about combustion?
The author claims that he doesn't "want to cancel or shame him personally", which just rings of false humility considering he named the article "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020" and then chose to expose his Youtube name repeatedly, something even other frustrated tweeters chose NOT to do.
Here's what CodeWithHarry did:
He created an example video of submitting a PR to an open source project that repeatedly reminded its viewers to make worthwhile contributions.
He then posted a lengthy response to again inform his viewers to NOT submit spammy PRs.
He's acting responsibly and in good faith.
Does this deserve lynching by the twitter mob?
Edit: Yes, the video appears to be mostly about showing kids how to get free swag with open source contributions without too much concern for whether these PRs are worthwhile. But the author of this post is absolutely trying to shame/cancel him personally.
Sure, the result is annoying, but it's really unfair to lay this on Harry's feet.
This sucks. Everyone involved who was named is just trying to encourage open source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9902nonYas
"How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!"
Simple fix, simple scripting of
prs.all().forEach( if pr.MinorChanges, then close w/ comment).
Minor changes are just taking the number of diff files, and checking if it’s less than > 1. That’s just one way to do it.
Feels like enough venting has been done, but why bring up the problem when you can come forth with a solution. Or at least propose one?
Furthermore, does this deserve Twitter attention? How about ours? [hn commubity]
For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially during Hacktoberfest. I promise you that this will actually be a net positive for your career.
Work on proprietary (aka closed source software) and earn money. Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us in the first place, and the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.
The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.
I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.
I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either.
I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.
Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money.
Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation?
It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
No, I'm saying that we should write great code, and not open source any of it. I don't understand why the concept is so unpopular?
> It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
Absolutely not. But I think that today, if Ghemawat made a typo fix contribution to 10 random projects for Hacktoberfest, at least one of those project maintainers who didn't know about him would be yelling about "spam". I'm not sure how to prove this; maybe someone who knows him can ask him to try? :) This is HN after all.
Also, since you bring it up, I'm guessing that the vast majority of Sanjay's code at Google is proprietary and not available to the world.
I'm not Indian, and I think the reputation comes largely from the proportion of educated people not behind the Great Firewall of China that are Indian, and people mistaking “the proportion of people who do I see do X thar are from Y background” with “the proportion of people from Y background who do X”.
But the bullshit is real, and its frustrating.
It's not the username in these examples that's the problem.
It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".
Minor typo fixes and such have been an established way to make a first bite-sized contribution to OSS projects. What changed this year that people are suddenly yelling at the top of their voices about the 30 (yes, thirty!) emails that they got this week?
- # React
+ # React an amazing project
I have made a genuine typo fixing PR and it was accepted by the repo. And yes, I don't belong to the group you refer to in your comment. I don't know what's happened with you or why you feel that way. It would be better to support your point with an example or an incident.
Do it 20k+ times and it very well may be. You appear uninformed about what is actually happening.
If you want to know how maintainers feel then read all of them.
I know, right! Incidentally, a past draft of my advice was going to refer to you and 'manishearth on the Rust core team as "good" examples to emulate. All this talk about "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like we are not welcome, but I guess a lot of people in this thread are saying otherwise, so I should consider that perspective.
People are complaining about actual spam that in no way improves their repo, and are angry at DO and GitHub for not being prepared for that. This has nothing to do with actual contributions and the people making them.
The fact is that DigitalOcean basically ran a lazy but well-meaning program that was promoted with a poorly-thought-out (but also well-meaning) video on YouTube to a majority Indian audience who largely had no experience with open source etiquette and thus we have the logical result. It’s not that they’re bad people or stupid or whatever, but they were just in the perfect storm of things that told them to do what they’re doing right now because they literally got no guidance at all. This is just “I accidentally sent my feature request email to the development mailing list because I’m unfamiliar with how this process works” but magnified by several orders of magnitude and also slanted towards participation by a certain group of people. The frustration is of course towards the circumstances that led to this happening but it’s often hard to express that and much easier to tweet angrily about “Indian dudes spamming me with PRs”.
Do you have any evidence to support this? I am an Indian and my own experience has been totally opposite. The open source community welcomed me, guided me, and appreciated my work when I began contributing to open source. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-559 for an example. This was my first significant open source contribution to an Apache project. I was young, naive, and had very little prior software development experience. The change I submitted added new features but it also removed a lot of code that I incorrectly assumed to be not serving any purpose. The Apache committers helped me to refine the change, make it better, and even appreciated it with a "Wow" with this comment: "Sorry for the late review... I have finally reviewed your patch and I have to say: Wow!"
I think this was very welcoming. It filled me with confidence to tackle more complex problems both at work as well as in open source. Thanks to that good experience, I still contribute to open source whenever I can and I write and maintain a few open source projects of my own.
I'm a teacher of economics and open source software including Python, Julia, LaTeX, R and Linux are essential to my work. I would find it hard to pay for proprietary equivalents of all the open source software I use. I consider it my duty to contribute back in whatever way I can.
My national pride is not hurt just because another Indian who did something wrong was criticised on the Internet.